The conservative organization One Million Moms wants Toys R Us to stop stocking an Archie comic book that features a gay wedding. In the story, the character Kevin Keller gets hitched to Clay, whom he met in a military hospital after being wounded in the armed services. The marriage occurs in Life With Archie #16, featuring a cover depicting the nuptials, and featuring a banner saying, “Just Married.” READ FULL STORY »
Last night on The Late Late Show, crime writer Lawrence Block made one of his periodic visits from the East Coast to chat with his pal Craig Ferguson. He was promoting his new novel, A Drop of the Hard Stuff, a terrific new addition to Block’s series of mysteries featuring private detective Matt Scudder. READ FULL STORY »
On the first of its back-to-back episodes this week, Parks and Recreation made an impeccable joke about Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. It was all the more impressive for being (a) a throwaway line that didn’t call attention to its own smartness, (b) not a dig at Franzen or his novel, and (c) totally in keeping with Leslie Knope’s character. READ FULL STORY »
The creepiest promo for Monday night’s Decision Points: A Conversation with George W. Bush was the snippet that played all last week during NBC’s entertainment programming, in which former president George W. Bush said to Matt Lauer, “Let’s talk about water-boarding” in an enthusiastic tone that suggested the subject was as fun and exciting as a trip to Disneyworld.
NBC’s promo department should be sent to the same woodshed where Keith Olbermann is being kept until Tuesday evening. It turned out that READ FULL STORY »
The advantage of Mad Men as a period piece is that it forces us to consider the way people thought and behaved a generation ago; we can’t go into the show assuming that if some copywriter comes up with a good idea, the boss will exclaim, “Awesome!” and there’ll be high-fives all around. (Aside from the fact that the culture hadn’t yet degenerated into jock democracy, everyone’s cigarettes and highball glasses would smash together.) The disadvantage of Mad Men as a period piece is that every time someone does something that seems odd or unexpected, viewers are tempted to say, “Oh, well, I guess that’s just how they would have reacted in those days.”
If we’re learning one thing about Mad Men in this apparently nonstop superlative season, it’s that READ FULL STORY »
